How we made a video out of pictures shot using Sony A9.

Super crazy! That’s Sony A9 for you storming conversations everywhere. Aimed at professional sports, action and wedding photographers, this 24MP, full-frame mirrorless camera has many features like the innovative full-frame stacked CMOS sensor with Integral memory, enhanced battery life, 5-stop 5-axis stabilisation and more. But what bowled us over was its speed – the ’20 frames per second’ with full autofocus. We wanted to pull something out with this feature. As a Sony Alpha Expert, I got lucky with a Sony A9 exclusively from Sony for three days. We were game to play with it.

HOW ABOUT A VIDEO WITH A SERIES OF PICTURES?

The very low viewfinder lag and absolutely no blackout during continuous shooting was the show-stealer. So this idea struck us. ‘Why not shoot a sequence of pictures and stack it together to create a video out of it?’ With a blend of art and action, we decided to shoot a Bharathanatiyam video. We reached out to the talented dancer Sowjanya, who agreed to perform for the shoot.

IN THE FIELD:

It all sounds exciting in the mind and on the paper, but during the shoot, you can never say it all goes per the plan. We set out to shoot the dance performance in the early morning on the sands and rocks of the Marina beach. Fortunately we got lucky with a friendly weather. We got started with the shooting spree. Thousands of pictures were shot. The wind was strong and the waves surprised us from the back at instances, but nothing fluttered the focus in frame. The boasting 693 AF points that was said to cover 93% of the frame did prove true with amazing focusing capabilities. The battery life was brilliant with half of it still young when we were done with the shoot.

VIDEO FROM THE PHOTOS

We then came over to the Studio, imported the pictures to Lightroom that were colour graded and then exported. These batch processed images were then imported to FCP and synced with the audio. We were thrilled with the output exported. You can hardly say that it is a series of pictures that you see in the video. But when you realise that fact, it is all so fascinating. As the tag line goes, it is dream meeting technology. Watch to find out for yourself.